Among Others

Thanks and Notes

I’d like to thank Aunt Jane, who accepted axiomatically that I would grow up and write, and her daughter Sue, now Ashwell, who gave me both The Hobbit and Le Guin’s Earthsea trilogy. I’m also grateful to Mrs. Morris, once my Welsh teacher, who worried about me for thirty years.

Mary Lace and Patrick Nielsen Hayden encouraged me while I was writing this. My LiveJournal correspondents were excellent at providing random required information, especially Mike Scott, without whom this would have been impossible. Some people have full-time research assistants who aren’t as speedy or as well informed. Thanks again, Mike.

Emmet O’Brien and Sasha Walton and, quite often, Alexandra Whitebean, put up with me when I was writing. Alter Reiss bought me a DOS laptop so I could keep on writing, and Janet M. Kegg found a battery for it and delivered it. My next-door neighbour René Walling found this book a title. I have the best friends. Seriously.

Louise Mallory, Caroline-Isabelle Caron, David Dyer-Bennett, Farah Mendlesohn, Edward James, Mike Scott, Janet Kegg, David Goldfarb, Rivka Wald, Sherwood Smith, Sylvia Rachel Hunter, and Beth Meacham read the book when it was done and made useful comments on it. Liz Gorinsky, and the hardworking production and publicity people at Tor, always do a great job paying attention to my books and helping get them into people’s hands.

People tell you to write what you know, but I’ve found that writing what you know is much harder than making it up. It’s easier to research a historical period than your own life, and it’s much easier to deal with things that have a little less emotional weight and where you have a little more detachment. It’s terrible advice! So this is why you’ll find there’s no such place as the Welsh valleys, no coal under them, and no red buses running up and down them; there never was such a year as 1979, no such age as fifteen, and no such planet as Earth. The fairies are real, though.